Nobody is perfect!

Yesterday started out okay; a day like any other it began with me writing my blog and then onto the rest of the day. I'm not sure when it started to go wrong; but I had a sense of scattering by mid morning. By noon I was fully discombobulated **To throw into a state of confusion. See Synonyms at confuse.** It wasn't a bad day; I was just "off" sort of all over the place so to speak. I was not my regular organized productive self.

This left me thinking about dogs and how they can have good days and bad days just like us. When I decided to be a professional dog trainer I had alot of things to consider and one of them was what I was going to expect from the dogs themselves. Having been involved with training since the age of 13 I'd already had alot of experience with many different trainers.

Some of the experiences I'd had over the years with training classes and trainers were not great; these all went into what type of trainer I was going to be. I clearly remember the first time I told one of my early clients "dogs are not robots." In my introductory years of conventional choke collar training; the dogs were treated very much like robots, I was not going to do that to dogs.

Somehow we expect so much more from our dogs than from other humans. We don't do what we are told the very second someone asks and we often completely ignore other humans. And yet when it comes to our dogs we expect them to present themselves or at least represent us as perfect. They aren't and we aren't either.

In the bad ole days of yank training; the dogs were not allowed to slip up. There was no room for error; not even the tiniest. So my clear decision was made the first day I stated that "dogs are not robots." They have days when they are on and days that when are off; they are emotional creatures. How can we possibly put such high demands as perfection on an animal when we ourselves aren't anywhere near.